Location 47:

The agony of inflation, however prolonged, is perhaps somewhat similar to acute pain — totally absorbing, demanding complete attention while it lasts; forgotten or ignorable when it has gone, whatever mental or physical scars it may leave behind.

Location 113:

This is, I believe, a moral tale. It goes far to prove the revolutionary axiom that if you wish to destroy a nation you must corrupt its currency. Thus must sound money be the first bastion of a society's defence.

Location 134:

The question to be asked — the danger to be recognised — is how inflation, however caused, affects a nation: its government, its people, its officials, and its society. The more materialist that society, possibly, the more cruelly it hurts. If what happened to the defeated Central Powers in the early 19203 is anything to go by, then the process of collapse of the recognised, traditional, trusted medium of exchange, the currency by which all values are measured, by which social status is guaranteed, upon which security depends, and in which the fruits of labour are stored, unleashes such greed, violence, unhappiness, and hatred, largely bred from fear, as no society can survive uncrippled and unchanged.

Location 142:

Financially, for nearly four years, the ultimate cataclysm was always just round the corner. It always arrived, and there was always an even worse one on its way — again, and again, and again. The speeches, the newspaper articles, the official records, the diplomatic telegrams, the letters and diaries of the period, all report month by month, year by year, that things could not go on like that any longer: and yet things always did, from bad to worse, to worse, to worse.

Location 152:

Undoubtedly, though, inflation aggravated every evil, ruined every chance of national revival or individual success, and eventually produced precisely the conditions in which extremists of Right and Left could raise the mob against the State, set class against class, race against race, family against family, husband against wife, trade against trade, town against country.

Location 183:

If prices went up, people demanded not a stable purchasing power for the marks they had, but more marks to buy what they needed. More marks were printed, and more, and more. Inflation, already in its fourth year when revolution overthrew the old regime, added a new, overwhelming uncertainty to the many uncertainties that attended the birth of the Weimar Republic.

Location 241:

The first stage of inflation took place under the auspices of one Karl Helfferich, State Secretary for Finance from 1915 to 1917. Before 1914, the credit policy of the Reichsbank had been governed by the Bank Law of 1875, whereby not less than one-third of the note issue had to be covered by gold and the remainder by three-month discounted bills adequately guaranteed. In August 1914 action was taken both to pay for the war and to protect the country's gold reserves. The latter objective was achieved by the simple device of suspending the redemption of Reichsbank notes in gold. The former was contrived by setting up loan banks whose funds were to be provided simply by printing them.

Location 246:

The loan banks would give credits to business, to the Federal states, to the municipalities and to the new war corporations; and, moreover, they were to advance money for war bond subscriptions. Loan bank notes, whose denominations ranged from one to 50 marks, were to be regarded as legal tender; and those not taken up by the Reichsbank were put into immediate circulation. However, the most ominous measure for the future was the one which permitted the Reichsbank to include three-month Treasury bills in its note-coverage, so that unlimited amounts could be rediscounted against banknotes.

Location 250:

Thus were the Government's plans drawn up, wilfully and simply, for financing the war — not by taxation, but by borrowing; and with the printing press as the well to supply both the needs of 5 the Government and the growing credit demand of private business. Taxation was to play not the smallest part in meeting the costs of war before 1916.

Location 263:

the money in circulation increased in 1917 to five times what it had been in 1913. As essential supplies day by day grew scarcer the money available to buy them grew proportionately more plentiful. As war-profiteering began to flourish — the war profits tax was a political sop, and an ineffectual one, rather than a serious fiscal innovation — the influence of the banks on the general economy declined in proportion. Even without losing the war, Germany would have had a hard task after 1918 to straighten out her finances again.

Location 292:

It must be admitted generally now that the cause of the depreciation of our currency and of the purchasing power of the mark was neither the commercial balance during the war nor the estimate of our military situation abroad; but in the exploitation of our currency for the purpose of obtaining money for the Treasury, that is to say in a fictitious increase of our total income.

Location 300:

The German standard of living, it was estimated, had fallen to about half what it had been before the war. It is indicative that the first street demonstration of the revolution in Munich, where 100,000 people took to the streets on November 7, was set off by an increase of 6 pfennigs in the price of a litre of beer. Not only conscripted soldiers had lost patience.

Location 429:

Although the misery of Austria was more immediately and directly the result of war, the pattern was to be repeated almost exactly in Germany. In both countries rapid inflation caused homegrown produce to be withheld from the urban markets, with hunger and anger the inevitable result.

Location 449:

Gambling on the stock exchange had become the fashion — the only way to avoid losing all one's money and perhaps to add to it.

Location 454:

Side by side with unprecedented want among the bulk of the population, there is a striking display of luxury among those who are benefitting from the inflation. New nightclubs are being opened. These clubs have the further effect of greatly intensifying the class hatred of the proletariate against the bourgeoisie.

Location 465:

Speculation on the stock exchange has spread to all ranks of the population and shares rise like air balloons to limitless heights … My banker congratulates me on every new rise, but he does not dispel the secret uneasiness which my growing wealth arouses in me